Cecilia Beaux at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

she is the one to the right, standing beside Dorotha Gilder.

Cecilia Beaux, American Figure Painter

Through April 13, 2008 at The Pennysylvania Academy of Fine Arts (http://www.pafa.org)

Cecilia Beaux (May 1, 1855 – September 7, 1942) was an American society portraitist!In the nature of John Singer Sargent.

She was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the youngest daughter of silk manufacturer Jean Adolphe Beaux and teacher and governess Cecilia Kent Leavitt, who died not long after giving birth. Beaux and her sister Etta were subsequently raised by their maternal grandmother and aunts. At the age of sixteen Beaux began art lessons with a relative, Catharine Ann Drinker, then studied for two years with the painter Francis Adolf Van der Wielen. At eighteen she was teaching at Miss Sanford's School, giving private art lessons, and producing decorative art and small portraits.She attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and studied with William Sartain until the early 1880s.She painted Les derniers jours d'enfance under him and its success made her decide to study in Paris. There she trained at the Académie Julian and Académie Colarossi, studying with painters Tony Robert-Fleury and William-Adolphe Bouguereau. In the summer of 1888 she worked in Concarneau with the American painters Alexander Harrison and Charles Lasar, during which time she expressed her decision to become a portrait painter.

She returned to America in 1889, and proceeded to paint portraits in a grand manner, taking as her subjects; members of her sister's family as well as the elite of Philadelphia. In 1890 she exhibited at the Paris Exposition, obtained in 1893 the gold medal of the Philadelphia Art Club, and also the Dodge prize at the New York National Academy of Design. In 1895 Beaux became the first woman to have a regular teaching position at the Pennsylvania Academy, where she instructed in portrait drawing and painting for the next twenty years.She won the Logan Medal of the arts at the Art Institute of Chicago, and became a member of the National Academy in 1902.

I wish I was in Pennsylvania so I would be able to view the art of such a source of Inspiration.

xxx
alice